No more we can give the content look for Google Adsense Ads ?

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You could have noticed that lot of publishers are trying to make more money from Google Adsense by mixing their content with the ads in a way which can be bit difficult for the readers to differentiate between the two. But, this may not continue any longer as Google is making efforts to put an end to this kind of ad placements. In their recent Blog entry, Google has given the following two guidelines for all the Adsense Publishers,

• Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads
• Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

Well, the purpose of both the guidelines almost seems to be same. That is,there should not be any confusion for the readers & they should be in a position to differentiate between the actual content & the ads.

I doubt whether Google itself is following these guidelines or not. Why because, whenever we search Google for something, first one or two results will be sponsored results & they look exactly similar to the other non-sponsored search results. I think this is totally against their 2nd guideline.

So, my question is, if Google can make money by creating a false illusion among the readers why can’t the poor publishers ?

I welcome all your thoughts on the same.

Transferring Blogger blogs from one account to another

Google doesn’t provide any direct way’s to transfer your blog(s) from one account to another. But still, this can be achieved meanderingly using few simple steps. To make things easier, lets assume currently your blog is associated with a mail account ‘old’ & you are interested in moving it to a new account called ‘new’.

Following are the steps that you need to follow to achieve this task.

1) Add ‘new’ as the author

Login to the ‘old’ account of your blogger & go to ‘Settings->Permissions’ page of the blog which you want to transfer from the Dashboard of your account. Here you can invite author’s to your blog by entering their mail ids. So, here just enter your ‘new’ mail id & send a request. To complete this process you need to accept the request by clicking on a link in the confirmation mail sent to your ‘new’ account & there by logging in to your new account. By this time your blog will be having 2 authors but, only one will be having the admin privileges.

2) Grant the admin privileges to ‘new’

From your ‘old’ blogger account grant the admin privileges to the ‘new’ account from the ‘permissions’ section of your blog. Here also ‘new’ account has to accept the request as mentioned in the previous step. Now, by this time your blog will be having 2 administrators.

3) Remove ‘old’ from the list of authors

From the ‘permissions’ section of your ‘new’ blogger account remove the ‘old’ from the author’s list. Now, you will be left with only one author com administrator i.e., ‘new’ for your blog.

‘Startup Lunch’ launched in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai & Pune

The Indian Entrepreneur’s group at proto.in have initiated a program called ‘Startup Lunch‘ to bridge the gap between the startup starter’s & professionals seeking job’s in startups. This initiative can help both the employers & employees to find their ideal match. Some times it can be a night mare for the startup’s to find right & bright candidates as not all the techie’s will be having technical skills or mind set required for working in a startup. On the other hand, the fresh collage grads or the people with relevant experience in the industry who are willing to work in a startup may not end up in finding a job of their choice because of the lack of information available about the startup’s. The ‘Startup Lunch’ aim’s to put an end to these problems.

The whole process has been kept simple by creating a Wikipage where both the Startups & people looking for a job can register their names under the respective cities.

Moving your gmails from one account to another

Though there is an option in Gmail to link one gmail account with another gmail account, it doesn’t provide any option for transferring all the mails & contacts from one account to the other. However, this task can be accomplished by using a tool called gXFER provided by LimitNone, an enterprise professional partner for Google. gXFER is a simple & easy to use utility for transferring the mails,contacts & calendar across multiple Gmail & Google Apps accounts. This tool can be useful in the following transfer scenarios

1) Gmail –> Gmail

2) Google Apps –> Google Apps

3) Gmail <–> Google Apps (both ways)

To begin the process, user’s first need to enter the user name & password for both the accounts. The migration process starts after confirming the transfer request through mail. The time it takes to complete the transfer process directly depends on the amount of data (mails) to be transferred. If the transfer involves large amount of data/mails it can even take few days to complete. The transfer of mails is done using Google’s mail fetcher program.

Limitation’s with gXFER

1) Chat histories’ stored in the original account are not transferred

2) Manually labelled emails will loose their labels in the new account. That is, only the emails labelled automatically using filters in the original account will retain their labels in the new account.

Free Blogger Templates

Most of the Blogger’s using Google’s Blogger need to spend a hell lot of time searching for suitable free blog templates on the Internet. The main reason for this might be because of the non availability of well designed templates in the default list of templates provided by the blogger. The default templates may just full fill the needs of basic blogger’s. Where as, people who like to give a professional look for their blog’s always need to go in search of suitable templates. On the other hand WordPress user’s may not face much problems with the templates, as quite a good number of well designed themes are provided by WordPress itself. And also, searching for other desired WordPress themes is much easier as there are more number of free WordPress themes available in the Internet compared to Blogger.

To lend a hand for my fellow blogger’s searching for free blogger templates, here i am creating a list of links from where one can get the blog templates of their choice.

Please feel free suggest any new links if it needs to be included in this list.

AdZant - Indias first adsense alternative

AdZant (beta) - which was launched recently is believed to be the India’s first Online Ad Marketplace or Adsense alternative for web publishers and advertisers. Unlike most of the other Adsense alternatives, AdZant allows the publishers to set their own price for advertising on their blogs. Also there is no minimum traffic requirement for making use of this product. Publishers can opt to sell ads on the basis of either PPC (Pay Per Click) or PPM (Pay Per Impression) or on the basis of duration like day, week or a month.

On the other side, Advertiser’s can choose the websites or blogs on which they want to Advertise on their own. They can search for suitable blogs using various filtering options like geography, language, Category, Ad Type & Page Ranks. They can buy the ads either at the price quoted by the publishers or they can offer their own price. Another feature which makes AdZant more powerful is its integration with Facebook. Its FaceZant application allows the Facebooker’s to share contents such as videos & photos and also to place ads in-between. This lets the facebooker’s to get paid when people view their shared content.

Scheduling blog posts in blogger

• Formatting problem
• No support for scheduling mails with images
• Only few mail providers have an option for scheduling the mails.

With the release of this new feature Google seems to have eased the whole process of scheduling. I think this is one of the best enhancement (atleast for me) to the blogger annonced by the Google team over the past few months. This can help lot of bloggers to easily mainatin a posting discipline which in turn may help them to drive more traffic to the blog.